Career Retrospective: Martina Beck

Biathletes retire too! I will be the first to admit that I know a lot less about biathlon than cross country, though, so these athlete profile posts for biathletes will be as much for my benefit as yours.

Martina Beck is (was) a very fast German biathlete. The International Biathlon Union has a nice article about her career and her decision to retire. Rumor has it she was an excellent shot, as well.

Since I’m much less of a biathlon expert, rather than pontificate on specific race results let’s just look at some data for her career…

I’m accustomed to skiers starting out quite slow and steadily improving. Beck appears to have been pretty uniformly fast for nearly her entire career.

Using percent back has its advantages, obviously, but we still miss some interesting stuff. For instance, Beck’s two faster OWG races in 2006 were actually good enough for silver medals (individual and pursuit).

The 2002-2003 season stands out, at least from a data perspective. She just wasn’t very slow that year. Subsequently, things seemed to revert to “normal”: centered around 5% back with some much better and some quite a bit slower.

The other interesting thing to note is the tendency to have seasons with almost no results between 0% and 2.25% back or so. I wonder if this is a result shooting performance…

In any case, Beck has seen fewer top results over the past few seasons, and her slower races appear to be getting slower. Again, pretty typical for someone nearing the end of a career.

Since we don’t have technique differences to ponder (biathlon only employs skating) let’s look at potential differences between race format:

I’ve labelled these by race length, but biathlon race formats have been quite stable over the years. The 7.5km is a “sprint”, which just means it’s short and they only shoot twice. The 15km is the “individual” and is an interval start race. The 10km is a pursuit race, usually based on the results of a previous sprint race. And the 12.5km is a mass start race.

I’d call that a slight preference for the longer mass start and individual races, particularly at her peak. If the rumors are true and Beck was indeed an excellent shot, this would make sense for her to be somewhat better in events that involved more shooting.

Let’s look at her shooting stats:

The solid lines are Beck and the dashed lines are an aggregate of the top ten female finishers for each season. The rumors appear to be true. Beck was indeed one of the better shots around. Two seasons in particular, 2002-2003 and 2007-2008 seem better than most of the rest. For her entire career, I have Beck shooting 90% prone, 87% standing and 88% overall. How good is that? Well, keep in mind that I only have data back to around 1991 or so, but here’s a table of shooting stats for women since then with at least 300 shots:

Women's career shooting stats for athletes with at least 300 shots.

Name

Nation

Prone

Standing

Overall

Number of Shots

ERTL Barbara

ITA

0.935

0.927

0.931

520

TANANAIKO Irina

BLR

0.912

0.895

0.904

1090

JONSSON Jenny

SWE

0.933

0.873

0.903

330

JONSSON Helena

SWE

0.895

0.907

0.901

1720

MALLAT Annukka

FIN

0.89

0.912

0.901

890

TANANAIKO Irina

UKR

0.921

0.868

0.895

380

LEVCHENKOVA Natalia

MDA

0.892

0.892

0.892

1690

BECK Martina

GER

0.901

0.869

0.885

3820

BRUNET Marie Laure

FRA

0.898

0.868

0.883

1000

PONZA Michela

ITA

0.907

0.86

0.883

3830

BAVEREL Florence

FRA

0.898

0.864

0.881

3330

KHVOSTENKO Oksana

UKR

0.892

0.867

0.88

2470

HOLOPAINEN Maija

FIN

0.889

0.868

0.879

380

IOURIEVA Ekaterina

RUS

0.873

0.88

0.877

820

FORSBERG Magdalena

SWE

0.926

0.824

0.875

2330

AKHATOVA Albina

RUS

0.873

0.875

0.874

2650

DORIN Marie

FRA

0.887

0.855

0.871

870

SKARDINO Nadezhda

BLR

0.912

0.829

0.871

1090

KETTUNEN Outi

FIN

0.916

0.822

0.869

1170

PIDHRUSHNA Olena

UKR

0.89

0.845

0.868

620

FALTUSOVA Lenka

CZE

0.896

0.836

0.866

900

KRISTIANSEN Elin

NOR

0.91

0.814

0.862

420

KUDRASHOVA Olga

BLR

0.848

0.875

0.861

960

HÖGBERG Elisabeth

SWE

0.9

0.818

0.859

560

ROGSTAD Solveig

NOR

0.869

0.848

0.859

750

TERESHENKO Natalia

UKR

0.89

0.829

0.859

490

BEER Katja

GER

0.872

0.841

0.857

2410

KARAGIOZOVA Iva

BUL

0.882

0.825

0.854

1530

ROMANOVA Iana

RUS

0.868

0.839

0.854

560

SALONEN Eija

FIN

0.864

0.844

0.854

1190

ANDREASSEN Gunn Margit

NOR

0.85

0.85

0.85

3360

EKLUND Catarina

SWE

0.806

0.894

0.85

320

GRUBBEN Linda

NOR

0.897

0.803

0.85

1910

CLAUDEL Veronique

FRA

0.887

0.812

0.849

1040

PALKA Krystyna

POL

0.851

0.848

0.849

1660

HENKEL Andrea

GER

0.873

0.824

0.848

4450

ZAITSEVA Olga

RUS

0.853

0.84

0.847

2210

HOLUBCOVA Katerina

CZE

0.897

0.793

0.845

2690

PETROVA Olena

UKR

0.876

0.815

0.845

2440

ZUBRILOVA Olena

BLR

0.887

0.802

0.845

1650

NIOGRET Corinne

FRA

0.832

0.856

0.844

3370

BURLET Delphyne

FRA

0.831

0.855

0.843

2030

BARNES Tracy

USA

0.858

0.826

0.842

690

MEDVEDTSEVA Olga

RUS

0.857

0.826

0.842

2960

MILLER SMITH Joan

USA

0.875

0.81

0.842

590

ZUBRILOVA Olena

UKR

0.89

0.793

0.842

1950

ALEXIEVA Nadejda

BUL

0.886

0.795

0.841

440

YU Shumei

CHN

0.84

0.839

0.84

1490

MURINOVA Anna

SVK

0.852

0.825

0.839

2980

MAKAROVA Joulia

RUS

0.859

0.818

0.838

340

There are women who’ve shot somewhat better, but they all have many, many fewer shots.

I don’t have any big conclusions here. Like I said at the start, a lot of what I write about biathlon will be as much about me learning about the sport and it’s athletes as anything else. But if there’s some more sophisticated number crunching that you’d like to see for biathlon, let me know in the comments and I’ll try to oblige.